President Trump is wading into the brewing labor dispute between the Long Island Rail Road and its labor unions, announcing today the formation of an “emergency board” to “investigate” the conflict. The presidential intervention heads off, for now, a strike, and comes at a time when Republicans are making an effort to forge closer ties with labor unions — worthy goals, to be sure. Yet the LIRR unions’ demands warrant caution on the part of the president. 

A Manhattan Institute analyst, Ken Girardin, warns that “the unions are trying to play Trump.” The stakes are high. A strike, which was threatened for Thursday, could have halted operations at America’s second-largest commuter railroad. Some 250,000 daily riders in the New York metropolitan area could have been stranded. A strike, too, could have disrupted golf’s Ryder Cup tournament, slated to bring more than 200,000 visitors to Bethpage State Park on Long Island.

The potential consequences of a strike don’t imply, however, that the president should intervene to avoid one at all costs — especially in light of the generous contracts under which the LIRR’s unions are already working. Governor Kathy Hochul’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which has been floundering on the LIRR, says that the railroad’s current labor pacts result in “the most costly and inefficient work rules in the entire railroad industry.”

The MTA, too, laments that the labor agreements boost the costs of running the railroad for riders and taxpayers. An independent watchdog group at Albany, the Empire Center, echoes these gripes. The center acquired the union contracts under the Freedom of Information Act and is spotlighting some of their most egregious and costly provisions. The findings suggest a union whose power is out of balance with the railroad’s — and taxpayers’ — interests.

Feature, say, the provision that entitles LIRR engineers to “an extra day’s pay if they operate electric and diesel trains on the same shift,” the center reports, “or if they operate trains in service and in a rail yard on the same shift.” On a railroad that runs both diesel and electric trains on a regular basis, it’s not hard to imagine how expensive this provision can get. Plus, too, it would appear all too common for a train to move between service and rail yards.

The center adds that LIRR engineers are currently paid an average of $49.92 an hour, which is some 7 percent higher than the norm for the industry. “With overtime, LIRR engineers collected an average of more than $160,000 in 2025,” the center adds. No one is begrudging trained professionals from earning a living, but for a taxpayer-funded agency, it is startling that the unions, per the center, are demanding 16 percent in raises over three years.

That, per the center, “is 6.5 points more than what other MTA bargaining units previously agreed to.” It comes at a time when the LIRR spent $207 million, 21 percent of its payroll, for overtime in 2024. These overtime costs, a symptom of mismanagement, have been scrutinized for years by the Empire Center. The group’s chief, Zilvinas Silenas, asks whether the overtime rules “simply pad the paychecks of a select few” — at taxpayers’ expense, to be sure. 

The LIRR unions are probably eyeing the 21 percent raises that their counterparts at NJ Transit won in May by inconveniencing riders with a strike. Making unreasonable concessions to militant unions, though, is no way to run a railroad. Mr. Trump will want to be careful, in his eagerness to bring union voters into the GOP fold, to avoid busting the MTA’s already strained budget by proposing excessively generous concessions to the LIRR employees.